We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

Luke, steeped in the Old Testament, makes clear that to understand what God was doing in Christ, one has to know Scripture; and especially the Book of Isaiah.

Two cross-modal experiments provide partial support for O'Regan & Noë's (O&N's) claim that sensorimotor contingencies mediate perception. Differences in locating a target sound accompanied by a spatially disparate neutral light correlate with whether the two stimuli were perceived as spatially unified. This correlation suggests that internal representations are necessary for conscious perception, which may also mediate sensorimotor contingencies.

Incomplete Archaeologies takes a familiar archaeological concept--assemblages--and reconsiders such groupings, collections and sets of things from the perspective of the work required to assemble them. The discussions presented here engage with the practices of collection, construction, performance and creation in the past (and present) which constitute the things and groups of things studied by archaeologists--and examine as well how these things and thing-groups are dismantled, rearranged, and even destroyed, only to be rebuilt and recreated. The ultimate aim is to reassert (...) an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasise the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artefacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology's seeming-seamless epistemological objects"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Gilbert Meilaender argues that Christian ethics must not be consequentialist. Though Meilaender does indicate some problems which may exist with certain consequentialist theories, those problems do not exclude all types of consequentialist theories from consideration as Christian ethical theories. A consequentialism like R. M. Hare’s offers virtually all the advantages Meilaender claims for his Christian deontological view. Moreover. Meilaender has overlooked certain advantages of consequentialism and certain disadvantages of the sort of deontological theory he espouses.

This paper continues a debate about the relation between Christian philosophers and theologians begun by Gordon Kaufman, who argued that Christian theologians need not be interested in “evidentialism.” In particular it replies to a paper by William Hasker charging that an earlier defense of Kaufman’s position introduced tensions because it required judgments about the merits of “evidentialism” which could be defended only by using the evidentialist arguments whose importance Kaufman denied. This reply denies that there are the tensions Hasker claims (...) and argues that the judgments need not rest on a detailed assessment of evidentialist arguments. (shrink)

It is thought that a valid inference to a logically necessary conclusion must proceed from entirely necessary premises. Counter-examples show this is false. Perhaps while the truth of a necessary proposition may follow from non-necessary premises, its necessity cannot so follow. Counter-examples show this to be mistaken. Must anyone who comes to know the non-necessary premises employed in the various counter-examples have prior knowledge of the necessity of the conclusions of the counter-examples? I argue against this. It is true that, (...) for any necessary proposition, there must be necessary premises from which it may validly be inferred; but no one need use these, or know these, or know how to use them, in order to know the necessity of any proposition. (shrink)

The canon, this full Christian-Torah story, is the paradigm God has given us so that we too can conjugate the verbs of his activity today and know his participation in our lives now.

My point of departure in this essay is Smith’s definition of government. “Civil government,” he writes, “so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” First I unpack Smith’s definition of government as the protection of the rich against the poor. I argue that, on Smith’s view, this is always part of (...) what government is for. I then turn to the question of what, according to Smith, our governors can do to protect the wealth of the rich from the resentment of the poor. I consider, and reject, the idea that Smith might conceive of education as a means of alleviating the resentment of the poor at their poverty. I then describe how, in his lectures on jurisprudence, Smith refines and develops Hume’s taxonomy of the opinions upon which all government rests. The sense of allegiance to government, according to Smith, is shaped by instinctive deference to natural forms of authority as well as by rational, Whiggish considerations of utility. I argue that it is the principle of authority that provides the feelings of loyalty upon which government chiefly rests. It follows, I suggest, that to the extent that Smith looked to government to protect the property of the rich against the poor, and thereby to maintain the peace and stability of society at large, he cannot have sought to lessen the hold on ordinary people of natural sentiments of deference. In addition, I consider the implications of Smith’s theory of government for the question of his general attitude toward poverty. I argue against the view that Smith has recognizably “liberal,” progressive views of how the poor should be treated. Instead, I locate Smith in the political culture of the Whiggism of his day. (shrink)

The book starts with a scandal, that is, Socrates’s mortality as entailed in the Aristotelian syllogism,All men are mortal,Socrates is a man,Therefore, Socrates is mortal. The scandal pertains to the deduction of Socrates’s death from the logical connections of premises, which, according to Braude, renders it “meaningless.” But, what does this scandal have to do with a philosophical defense of intuition in medicine? For Braude, the scandal is emblematic of a crisis in medicine and philosophy—a crisis in which human mortality (...) is severed from its morality. Braude articulates the crisis with the following question:Where, therefore, between the cracks of universal logic and reifying medicine is there a place for the individual patient, for a response to the cry of pain to which medicine responds, or to the voice of injustice upon which moral philosophy is founded? For him, intuition provides a means to answer the question and thereby to resolve the crisis. It serves as “a bridge be .. (shrink)

While taking its departure from James Doull's review of my The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought, the present note is not intended to be an author's reply to a reviewer—always in bad taste, and in this case quite unwarranted when the review in question shows all the fair-mindedness and care any author could ask for. My note is much rather part of a dialogue, agreed on in advance by both participants, in which Hegel, not a book on Hegel, is (...) the subject. (shrink)

I argue that coherentists can admit that there are facts about what systems of beliefs communities accept, without being committed to the claim that these facts are the truth conditions of sentences about what communities accept. (edited).

The combination in the “succession narrative” of completely plausible candor about the human and confidence in the sovereign involvement of the Lord, poses the question of providence in the most profound way possible.

This original and thought-provoking volume examines organic life as subjective activity. It shows that organic life operates differently from objective thought and truth. The volume considers topics such as: the origin of life, the absorption of food, the operation of heredity, and the possible control of further evolutionary development.

Papers presented at a conference held at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, in Apr. 2006.

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Bastiat emphasized the institutional infrastructure of a market economy and the principle of spontaneous order. He began with first principles — the primacy of property and consent — and derived the legitimate functions of government. As a pioneer in constitutional political economy, he examined the relation between economics and politics, employed methodological individualism, and extended the exchange paradigm to collective choice. He showed that the attenuation of economic liberty in the pursuit of distributive justice under majoritarian government would lead to (...) rent-seeking, corruption, and politicization of economic life.Bastiat met l’accent sur l’aménagement institutionnel de l’économie de marché et sur le principe de l’ordre spontané. Son analyse débute avec les principes premiers — la primauté de la propriété et du consentement — et il infère de ces principes les fonctions légitimes du gouvernement. En tant que pionnier de l’économie politique constitutionnelle, il examine les liens entre la sphère économique et la sphère politique, a recours à l’individualisme méthodologique et étend le paradigme de l’échange aux choix collectifs. Il montre que l’érosion de la liberté économique qu’entraîne la recherche d’une justice distributive sous un gouvernement majoritaire mène à la recherche de rentes, à la corruption et à la politisation de la vie économique. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to provide an overview and examination of the thought of the significant contemporary sociologist, Peter L. Berger. Berger is concerned with the issue of how meaning is constructed in modern, secular, bureaucratic society. Furthermore, this thesis seeks to outline, and trace the development of, Berger's thought. To achieve this the thesis examines Berger's use of the disciplines of the sociology of knowledge and religion, along with contemporary studies in religion and theology. Berger, by linking the function of (...) a theodicy with that of making meaning, allows for theodicies to be conceived of in the broader context of making meaning in contemporary society. As such, a contemporary theodicy needs to include (indeed, it needs to be inclusive, rather than exclusive) such factors as the relationship between self, others, the world, and the transcendent so as to provide some basis for an authentic and meaningful existence. There is a need for a more inclusive theodicy (other than the traditional individualistic type) which has hermeneutic concern for the 'whole' (wholeness of self, wholeness in relationships with others, wholeness with the world/environment, and wholeness with the transcendent). However, this 'wholeness' will not be provided by over-arching, public, structures or systems; it will need to be through chosen, private means which reflect the Post-Modernist situation where 'closure' on a grand scale is unobtainable (Marshall, 1992, pp. 192 -193). Berger's work provides the possibility for this legitimation of a theodicy (or theodicies) which will provide meaning in Post-Enlightenment society. The construction of meaning in contemporary society needs an ability to cope with complexity, it needs to be reasonable, as well as contemporary (to cope with the plurality in modern society), and it is on the way (that is, not given to closure). Therefore any contemporary theodicy, or system of meaning, must be able to be historically concerned (that is, conscious of its origins and open to the future), empirical (that is, open to scrutiny and review), inductive (that is, dealing with concrete reality, not abstract theory), and concerned with people's lived experience. Berger's signals of transcendence allow for the legitimation of this private, deinstitutionalized religion; that is, they legitimate a meaningful theodicy for contemporary humanity. This theodicy, which is able to accommodate the wider view current in modern society provided by the ecological movement, interaction between the various religious traditions, the feminist movement, the reality of multi-culturalism, and the resulting pluralism from the above factors, can provide some basis for a meaningful and authentic existence in contemporary society. The signals of transcendence are able to correlate people's lived experience (their 'natural reality') to a reality which is "in, with and under" that natural reality (Berger, 1992, p. 155). (shrink)

Papers from a series of conferences organized by the Esalen Institute Program on Revisioning Philosophy (a few of the 18 essays have been previously published) reflect one common theme--the need to out the envelope of contemporary ...

This book explores how the Hebraic and classical traditions forming our Western heritage combined from about 300 BCE to 300 CE. James Arieti investigates the principal causes of the merger in the common model of God that developed in the Greek philosophical schools, along with its ethical implications, and the shared portrayal in biblical, rabbinic, and postclassical literature of the compassionate warm character that we recognize as a mentsh.

This study explores professional footballers’ perceptions of where banter crosses the conceptual line into bullying. The study’s focus is of importance, given the impact that abusive behaviors have been found to have on the welfare and safeguarding of English professional footballers. A phenomenological approach was adopted, which focused on the essence of the participants’ perceptions and experiences. Guided by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 male professional footballers from three Premier League and Championship football clubs. The (...) findings from this study revealed several key superordinate themes in relation to the dividing line between bullying and banter. These themes included “perception,” “intentionality,” “detecting the line,” and “having a bit of banter.” The findings demonstrate how perceptions of bullying and banter are nuanced by individual differences among the players and the culture of the professional football context. Specifically, it was found that the professional football context can legitimize forms of humor blurring the lines between bullying and banter, challenging the typically positive view of the concept of banter in this environment. From an applied perspective, these findings highlight the need for coaches, players, and football clubs more broadly to address cultural expectations around banter in their environment, while educating individuals around their own perceptions of bullying and banter. (shrink)

The authors offer their sincere thanks to all of the commentators for taking the time to comment on our work ; one of the advantages of the AJOB format is immediate feedback,...

"Off and on, of late years, I have studied the history and development of all religions with immense interest as being for me, at least, the most illuminating 'case histories' of the inner life of man."--Eugene O'Neill writing to M. C. Sparrow, 1929 While it is commonly accepted that Eu­gene O'Neill studied Oriental mystical religions and that this study may be detected in some of his less successful experimental plays (Lazarus Laughed, The Fountain, Marco Millions) there has not been an (...) effort to con­sider systematically his "immense interest" and the influence it had on O'Neill's thought and writing. Robinson explores the tension between Occidental and Oriental elements in the playwright's art, examining both the sources of the conflict and its manifestation in selected plays written between 1916and 1942. Through an examination of O'Neill's cor­respondence, research library, and manuscript materials (some of which have pre­viously been unavailable for study) Robinson is able to reveal the origins of O'Neill's Ori­entalism. An easy familiarity with the com­plex interrelationships of Eastern and West­ern religions and the Oriental thought that underlies the ideas of many Western philoso­phers, allows Robinson to address the in­tricate problem of Oriental influences on O'Neill's favorite Western sources, including Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, Strindberg, and Emerson. Finally in a play-by-play exegesis, Robin­son traces the course of O'Neill's mysticism from its apparent repudiation in the deeply flawed Dynamo to its synthesis in The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Hughie, where Eastern ideas of maya, dy­namic polarity, and the emptiness of the uni­verse are again evident. (shrink)